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COOP Careers automates 350+ mock interviews during Fall 2019 Cohort

77% of users thought that COOP should keep using Talk Hiring in future cohorts

Published: July 2, 2020

What is COOP Careers?

COOP Careers ("ko-op"​) is a nonprofit "overcoming underemployment through digital skills and peer connections."​ COOP closes the social capital gap by recruiting and investing deeply in diverse, low-income, and first-generation grads from the City University of New York, San Francisco State, and other urban public colleges. Four-in-five alumni work full-time, earning an average of $45,000 after 12 months (3x pre-program average) and almost $70,000 after three years (2x peer baseline). Long-term, COOP aims to double lifetime income of COOP alumni—fueling upward mobility and fulfilling our collective promise of higher education.

Why did COOP want to use Talk Hiring?

COOP has two tracks: digital marketing and data analytics which tackle the hard skills. Both tracks encompass soft skill training for career readiness preparation. We wanted to partner with Talk Hiring to help with the soft skill training surrounding interview prep. Our graduates apply for jobs in the highly-competitive media and tech industry and we know that digital skills are not enough to land the job. COOP's curriculum puts a lot of emphasis on interview prep and all participants (known as COOPers) are required to do 2-3 mock interviews with volunteers in the community. With Talk Hiring, COOPers are able to practice their interviewing skills more than a few times. Additionally, Talk Hiring's dashboard can be shared with cohort captains to track where COOPers are doing well and where they could improve.

Rychelle McKenzie and Jennifer Matos lead up Partnerships at COOP. Jennifer and Rychelle were excited that Talk Hiring could help quantify how COOPers were becoming stronger interviewees. They wanted to see a clear improvement in interview content, confidence, and the way that COOPers present themselves. As Jennifer said, "Interviewing well is such a huge part of your career."

What are the results?

352 mock interviews
4.19 mock interviews per person
73% of interview responses showed improvement!*

*How are we measuring improvement in interviewing skills? Measuring interviewing competency objectively is tough. What we do is, we take the first time a user answered a specific question and the last time that user answered that question. We compare the two answers across a variety of dimensions (number of relevant details, conciseness, delivery fluency, length of speaking time) to evaluate if answers improved.

How did it go?

The COOP Partnerships Team surveyed users in the winter of 2019 to get their feedback on Talk Hiring. 77% of users thought that COOP should keep using Talk Hiring in future cohorts!

What did users say?

"The fact that it's software instead of an actual person — it makes you feel you more comfortable with making mistakes or taking your time to really think about the questions being asked."
"The immediate feedback was great"
"The ability to playback the answers you gave to each question was useful because it allowed me to judge whether I was getting to the core of what was asked. Also, it was valuable to know the common questions that are asked to help me determine what might be asked of me on an interview and concepts I should review from time to time."
"The simple process and questions, it flowed easily"
"Being able to think on the spot of a response to a question that would actually be asked during an interview and playing it back."

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